Capitalism Archive

"In a world of unpredictable change, why would thinking people—or governments—hand over their fates to a system so divorced from reality? None would. But then, as Martin Heidegger (2003 [1955]: 88) observed more than half a century ago, “…man today is in flight from thinking.”

"Given the relation between economic production and ecological degradation, Joshua Farley is convinced that economic growth must stop. It is just a question of when. And whether cooperation will displace competition as the dominant concept in the economic paradigm."

The elite multinational and Wall Street banks and investment banks have been preparing and waiting for this golden moment for years. Over the past few years, they have amassed war chests of infrastructure funds to privatize water, municipal services, and utilities all over the world. It will be extremely difficult to reverse this privatization trend in water.

"Expelled from their lands because of the continuous process of colonization, more than 40,000 Guarani Kaiowá now live on less than 1% of their original territory. On their lands today, there are thousands of hectares of sugarcane put in place by multinational enterprises that portray ethanol to the world as an "environment friendly" and "clean" fuel."

"Locked in colonies and indirect rule of neocolonialism, restricted to lives characterized by brutality, ignorance and violence in the barrios of the Americas and other internal colonies characterized as Indian reservations and black ghettos, kept under the paranoiac, nuclear-backed, armed-to-the-teeth watch of military forces born of a state power that has its origins in protecting the relationship between capitalism and its imperial pedestal, capitalism has been the absolute factor in restricting production and development by concentrating productive capacity in the hands of the world’s minority European population that sits atop the pedestal of our oppressive reality."

The scale and speed of the emerging ecological challenge, manifested not only in climate change but also in numerous other planetary rifts, constitutes irrefutable evidence that the root cause of the environmental problem lies in our socioeconomic system, and particularly in the dynamic of capital accumulation.

"Two characters that lived in the first half of the 20th century in the United States played a major ideological role. For Walter Lippmann, the political journalist, citizens are not capable of understanding the basic political issues at stake. “The role of the public is not really to express an opinion, rather it is to support an opinion or not. On this basis, it is impossible to maintain that a democratic government can directly express the common will.” (7) The mass, therefore, should put its faith in “responsible men”. And it should be possible to govern the people by the “manufacture of consent” (the making of common will), using psychological methods of manipulation."

"Knowing nothing about de Tocqueville, the ten-year-old son of a friend put his own spin on recent history: “Mom, I think people value Father Time more than they value Mother Earth.” His words sting me like freezing rain, squeezing tears from the corners of my eyes. There’s nothing new there for me, except the perspective of youth: I often weep when I think about the hellishly overheated world we’re leaving him and his young friends. We’re destroying this world in large part because we care more about chasing fiat currency than we care about the living planet and its occupants."